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Please note I am self taught and this is not comprehensive. If there is any information you want added or changed please let me know at cwlee@calstate.edu.

Recommended Habits

Alma Letters can be complicated and are often edited by different people over time. To keep things simple, and to avoid issues, there are several habits you should consider developing when working with Letters.

• Copy the Letter and save it in a folder on your computer, drive, or department server before editing. Then if something goes wrong you can easily restore the previous version of the letter.

• Click Preview after every change to see if the change breaks the code.

• Keep a change log of some sort. This can be a note in the code using Note Tags (<!-- Note Text -->).

• Formatting and spacing in the code isn’t as strict as other forms of programming, but keeping things formatted will make it easier for you, and future code editors, to read and understand. I recommend pasting the code into a XML formatter to keep it formatted after editing. I use this one: https://www.freeformatter.com/xml-formatter.html

XSLT Basics

When writing XSLT you need to keep in mid that the code needs an opening and closing tag for each action. An opening tag is formatted as <X> and a closing tag is </X>. For every opening tag there must be a closing tag. Everything between the two tags has the effect of that tag, so it will be on the same row or cell, have the same font, or all be highlighted depending on the tag used.

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